Flirtation Walk

There are several movies coming up on TCM in the next two or three days that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before. Two of them are part of a double bill of Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler musicals that I think were on the same double bill when I recorded them some months back. The first of those movies is Flirtation Walk, which shows up overnight between May 9 and 10 at 1:45 AM (so that's technically early May 10 in the Eastern time zone, but still May 9 in the Pacific). The second one is Shipmates Forever, but that's not getting a post of its own just yet because I've never been the biggest fan of doing multiple posts on movies from the same person or in a closely similar genre in close succession if I can avoid it. That, and there are two movies overnight between May 10/11 which aren't really related, so one of them gets a post tomorrow, May 9, with the other getting a post on May 10.

Dick Powell plays Dick Dorcy, an enlisted man in the Army who is stationed in Hawaii (this being a dozen years or so before World War II) serving under Sgt. Thornhill (Pat O'Brien). Ruby Keeler plays Kit Fitts, who is the daughter of a general who is only passing through Hawaii on his way to a posting in the Philippines, since that was a US colony at the time. Gen. Fitts is traveling with his daughter, as well as an adjutant, Lt. Biddle (John Eldredge) who also happens to be Kit's boyfriend, something you'd think might be a problem considering Biddle might be serving under his future father-in-law.

Now, since Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are top billed, you might guess that they're going to get romantically involved, and might just even wind up together in the final reel, although it's going to take several reels for them to get together for that requisite happy ending. The two characters are brought together courtesy of Sgt. Thornhill, who assignes Dorcy to be Miss Fitts' driver while she's on Oahu. Kit wants to see the island, so she orders Dorcy to take her off base to some of the more scenic spots, with the two of them winding up at a luau where it seems Dorcy already knows some of the ethnic Hawaiian locals, even singing "Aloha Oe".

But Dorcy is an enlisted man, and Fitts is not only the daughter of an officer, but a young woman who already has an officer pursuing her. So he doesn't quite understand it when he gets accused of wrongdoing and Kit says she didn't really love Dorcy. Dorcy first thinks about desertion, but ultimately decides that the way to get the respect of people like Kit and Biddle is to become an officer himself. I don't know if they had an Officer Candidates' School back in those days, but in any case Dorcy eschews this, applying to West Point instead!

Dorcy somehow gets accepted, and is good at the military stuff, to the point that by the time senior year comes along, he's considered a leader among men in his class. He's even given the job of writing the class revue for senior spring. But a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works when West Point gets a new commandant: Gen. Fitts! He brings back his daughter, who is still involved with Biddle although they're still not engaged. Nobody else at West Point knows about Dorcy's previous involvment with Miss Pitts, so when the cadets all meet her, everyone else is taken with her while Dorcy feigns complete indifference.

The other cadets, thinking Kit is so charming, decide that they want to break with tradition and include a female part in the revue, with Kit being just the woman for the part. Dorcy, of course, is mortified, and this leads to the complications that eventually get resolved in the standard-issue happy way in the final reel.

Flirtation Walk somehow got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, although that was the first era of having 10 Best Picture nominees before it got cut to five in the early 1940s. Looking through the list of nominees (this was the year It Happened One Night won), it also looks like a fairly weak list of nominees. It's not that Flirtation Walk is bad; it's more that it pales in comparison to Warner Bros.' musicals of the previous year, and feels a lot more like a programmer than a prestige movie. I'm not the biggest fan of Ruby Keeler, but the movie doesn't give her enough to do. Ditto Pat O'Brien, since the movie in many ways seems like two movies grafted together, the Hawaii half and the West Point half.

Still, everybody is more than professional with the material they're given, and nobody really hits a wrong note. So Flirtation Walk winds up being something more than pleasant enough, and certainly entertaining for fans of musicals or romantic dramedies. But there's a reason why Flirtation Walk is less well-known than a lot of other musicals out there.

High Flyers

TCM ran a couple of the Wheeler and Woolsey movies a couple of months back that I hadn't seen, so I recorded them in order to be able to do posts on them. First up is what actually turned out to be the team's final film, High Flyers.

We don't actually see Wheeler and Woolsey for the first several minutes, as there's an establishing scene at one of those rich estates. After a musical number, we're introduced to the Arlingtons, wealthy Horace (Paul Harvey) and his ditzy wife Martha (Margaret Dumont), who is into crystal balls and other occult stuff. Mr. Arlington is having a bunch of jewels being brought over from Europe, and doesn't want anyone to know that the jewels are arriving on a certain ship the next day. Having said that, he's dumb enough to tell a newspaper editor, Mr. Hanlon (Jack Carson in an early role), about it, as a way of saying how he doesn't want the press to publicize this information.

Never mind that Hanlon is actually a crook who has an idea for how to steal those jewels. He's going to commandeer a seaplane, and get one of his henchmen already on board to steal the jewels and throw them overboard in a hollowed-out life preserver. (As if nobody would see this happening.) The seaplane will pick up the jewels, and then drop them off in a cove where Hanlon is waiting. And he's got two pilots. Cut to a carnival, where we see Pierre (Robert Woolsey) as a carnival barker getting people to see the airplane-like contraption in which his partner Jerry (Bert Wheeler) is riding. They've been passing themselves off as expert pilots, but the truth is that neither of them has flown a plane before. Worse, Pierre has committed enough fraud that he's wanted by the authorities in Philadelphia because of probation issues!

Not that the boys know that they're going to be getting stolen jewels; Hanlon tells them he's got press photos from some event in Europe that he wants to get before anybody else, hence the ruse to throw them overboard. Despite not having piloted any plane, let alone a seaplane before, and not realizing that Hanlon had actually stolen a Coast Guard seaplane, the two set off to get the life preserver. They are unsurprisingly spotted by the Coast Guard, who pursue after them, with bit of difficulty because the life preserver also has boxes of some sort of drug that causes the two of them to get quite high.

Since they're high and have never piloted a plane before, it can only end up in disaster, and eventually the two crash land. Wouldn't you know it, however, but they crash land right on the Arlington estate. Not that they know that the jewels they've found belong to the Arlingtons and they could save the day by delivering the jewels to Mr. Arlington. Instead, chaos ensues as Pierre and Jerry try to pass themselves off as undercover detectives, while dealing with the Arlingtons, their maid Juanita (Lupe Velez) and their daughter Arlene (Marjorie Lord).

Wheeler and Woolsey were decidedly second best, in part because they were working at RKO which never had the budget that other studios could command. I think the formula was also beginning to get stale; the two had been working together for almost 10 years, starting on Broadway and then making some 20 features. Woolsey was also beginning to get sick to the point of no longer being able to work; he died about a year after High Flyers.

Still, a lot of what made Wheeler and Woolsey work is here, and if you like their material it's not as bad as some reviewers suggest.

TCM Star of the Month May 2024: Sessue Hayakawa

Sessue Hayakawa in Bridge on the River Kwai (May 27, 10:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, and because it's a demographic checkbox month, we're going to get a Star of the Month on TCM who doesn't necessarily have too many movies to show, but fits the correct demographics. May is Asian-American/Pacific Islander month, so TCM is giving us someone of Asian descent, or in this case actually born in Japan: Sessue Hayakawa. His films will be shown Mondays in prime time, and it's also an opportunity for TCM to rerun that documentary on Hollywood's portrayal of Asians.

TCM is showing just 11 of Hayakawa's films, which might be the lowest number ever for a Star of the month, although a couple of people who got Sunday showings might have been less: Dorothy Dandridge and Paul Robeson come to mind. Note that even though there's going to be a war movie marathon over Memorial Day weekend as TCM usually does, it's not going to interrupt the salute to Hayakawa as he appeared in a pair of movies set in World War II: Three Came Home and Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which air on May 27.

That's the Spirit

One of the movies I recently watched off my DVR after it aired on TCM had enough room for a one-reeler. That short was an early Vitaphone musical, That's the Spirit.

The opening title card most prominently mentions Noble Sissle, an early black bandleader, but this isn't one of those static shorts where they stuck a camera in front of a band or singer and had them perform. Instead, there's an odd establishing story. Miller and Moreland (I hadn't heard of Miller, but the latter is a young Mantan Moreland) were apparently a vaudeville pair are walking down a street, where Miller tells Moreland he's gotten Moreland a job as a night watchman in a pawn shop. However, the shop turns out to be haunted, as various items start moving of their own accord, serving as segues to the musical numbers.

After a more traditional jazzy number, we get a flying washboard, and dissolve to a small combo that does a musical number involving playing on a washboard. Next up is a fur coat talking to a man's coat, which leads into a musical number complete with an energetic lady, Cora La Redd (another singer I hadn't heard of) who also dances. One interesting thing is that while it would be wrong to call her fat or even overweight, she's certainly not as petite as later singers would seem to be. After one final song from the band as a whole, it's time for the finale.

This finale is an odd one, as the two men, scared of all the stuff in the pawn shop that comes to life, want to leave. Miller has no problem, but Moreland's shoes won't seem to let him leave. So he jumps out of his shoes, at which point we learn that the shoes have come to life too but don't want any part of this pawn shop either!

The framing story to That's the Spirit is bizarre, but the songs are pretty good on their own and an excellent time capsule of what might have been popular among audiences in the early 1930s. I'm not certain whether the short was intended for black audiences (I can't recall much that the studios made expressly for black audiences, after all), or more likely for those whites who wanted to go slumming or whatever virtue signally would have been called 90 years ago. (I was going to say it didn't exist back then, but remembered that there have always been "do-gooders".) Either way, it's nice that the music was preserved on screen and not just on records.

Dandy, the All-American Girl

Another of those 1970s movies that I'd never heard of before seeing it in the TCM schedule was Sweet Revenge. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it to watch it later and do a review. Having finally gotten around to watching it, I can now do the review.

The movie opens up outside a Seattle-area car dealership one night, where two twentysomethings are looking in. On a revolving platform is a Ferrari Dino, a limited-edition sportscar that the young lady looking in, Vurrla (Stockard Channing), tells her boyfriend Andy that she's going to have a Dino one day. He naturally assumes she's planning on stealing a Dino, since the car is well outside their means, $20,000 in mid-1970s dollars. But it's not something she can steal, since it's made in such limited numbers that it would be easily traced. Her plan is to get the money a bit at a time, by stealing other cars.

Cut to her stealing one of those other cars, a nice convertible sports car. She unsurprisingly get caught in the car, transporting a large wall mirror, and since she's got an out-of-state license and can't produce the registration, the police take her down to the county jail, where she doesn't even have the money to be bailed out.

The public defender's office sends Le Clerq (Sam Waterston) to the prison to learn about her case. He calls her Dandy, that presumably being the name on her fake ID. She starts crying about how she doesn't have a record and doesn't want to wind up in prison, and that the cops are just using her to get at Jimmy. Of course there is no Jimmy, but Le Clerq isn't going to figure this out until after the initial hearing, where he gets her off on personal recognizance, as long as she signs a statement that she'll appear again in 15 days' time.

That bit about there being no Jimmy is only the first of many, many like Vurrla is going to tell Le Clerq. She lies about where she lives, she engages in shoplifting, and she unsurprisingly skips out on the court appearance. Oh, and later in the movie she's going to cajole Le Clerq into engaging in another of her shoplifting schemes. But the real plan is to steal some lesser cars, make them appear legal with the help of car stereo thief Edmund (Franklin Ajaye), and then sell the not-quite legal cars to unsuspecting marks. Of cours, the law is going to catch up with her eventually....

Sweet Revenge is a movie that got a very limited release back in the 1970s and a re-release in the early 1980s. Upon the re-release, the critics panned it, and it's easy to see why. Channing is playing a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a manipulator who lies to everybody around her and is frankly exhausting to be with I didn't like her, and this is the sort of movie where you really need to like the protagonist for the movie to work.

On the other hand, people who enjoy the sort of non-mainstream movies that Hollywood's new filmmakers were making in the 1970s may well enjoy Sweet Revenge. Be warned that this is a movie that's decidedly not for everyone.

Not to be confused with Before Sunrise

Another of the programming themes TCM did a day of a while back was "old dark house" movies from the 1930s, movies in which a bunch of people gather at a house looking for... something, usually with some danger afoot as well. One of the movies I hadn't heard of before was Before Dawn, and since it sounded interesting, I decided to record it.

The movie starts off nowhere near the house, but in Vienna. In a hospital, a Dr. Cornelius (Warner Oland) approaches a nurse, asking about an American patient who is dying. Cornelius talks to the patient, who reveals that 15 years ago back in the States, he robbed a bank and stashed the proceeds from the robbery -- a cool one million dollars, which was a lot back in the early 1930s -- in a house somewhere, mentioning where the house is but not where in the house the money is. The man then dies, and it's not illogical to assume that Dr. Cornelius is going to show up again later in the movie since he's played by someone near the top of the cast list.

We then cut to the house in question, where two old women are living. One of them is Mrs. Marble (Jane Darwell), who hears about the man's death, and is thrilled because it means that she can get the money now after having waited for 15 years for the man to die. The other woman, Mattie, isn't so sanguine about the idea of getting the money, as though it's caused so much disaster for everybody involved with the money that she'd just like to clean her hands of it. Sure enough, Marble climbs the stairs and sees the ghost of the American who stole the money. She, frightened, falls down the stairs to her death.

We then cut again to a clairvoyant named Patricia (Dorothy Wilson), who is giving a reading to one Dwight Wilson (Stuart Erwin). Wilson is actually an undercover police detective, and his job is to find phony psychics who prey on the emotionally needy and desperate, being pushed into it by her father Horace (Dudley Digges). Wilson gives her a question with no right answer, and before she can tell him this he arrests her and her father.

Patricia, upon being taken to the police station, protests that she wasn't given a chance to tell Dwight he'd asked a trick question. And then in a shocker, she starts giving other information that implies she might be a real no-fooling psychic, and not like all the others who are of course phonies. The cops thinking that she might possibly be useful, bring her and her father to the house where the money may or may not be hidden. Wilson comes along, since he's a detective and it's his job to retrive the money and return it to its proper owners. Also coming, direct from Europe, is Dr. Cornelius.

Before Dawn is little more than a B movie, although to be fair most of the "old dark house" movies were never conceived as prestige movies. However, it's more than entertaining enough. The story is of course nonsense, but when has a nonsense story stopped a movie from being entertaining? Especially in the pre-Code days when talking pictures were realatively new, there were a lot of off-the-wall plots as studios tried all sorts of different things to see what might or might not work. Before Dawn works more than it doesn't, and is definitely worth a watch.

Fritz Lang does Rebecca

Some months back, TCM ran a movie that sounded interesting to me, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do a review on it. This time, the movie in question is Secret Beyond the Door. Having watched it, it is now time to do the review of the movie.

Celia (Joan Bennett) starts off with a bizarre prologue about certain dreams, before telling us that doesn't matter because it's her wedding day! She's in Mexico, where she's met Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). She went to Mexico after the death of her brother, and wound up with a trust fund that her lawyer set up. He's not just the family lawyer, he's a good friend who is willing to marry her. But as we see she winds up marrying this mysterious Mark.

The honeymoon seems to go well, until she locks the door of her suite as a bit of a joke to make him jealous. Mark responds by saying that he has to go back to New York immediately. He's been publishing a money-losing magazine, and supposedly a company in New York wants to buy it. He's also abruptly emotionally cold to Celia, telling her that she shouldn't follow him to New York, but instead should go straight to the Lamphere family home outside of the city. And then the maid tells her Mark was lying about getting a telegram. Nice way to start a marrige.

And then Celia gets to her new home, and finds that there's a lot more going on. Mark is an architect, which is no big deal, but the much bigger deal is that he's a widower, with a teenaged kid that Mark never told Celia about. Also living at the house are some servants, Mark's sister Caroline (Anne Revere), and a personal assistant, Robey (Barbara O'Neil). Robey jealously guards Mark's office, and wears scarves because she got burned saving David from a fire some time back.

If the secrets we've already found out that Mark kept from Celia aren't enough, we're going to find there's a lot more. When Mark holds a house party, he decides to show off his hobby, which is designing spare rooms that are replicas of rooms where famous murders happened! Boy is that odd, and it unsurprisingly puts Celia off a bit. She's even more put off when there's one room that's locked. That must be the room where Mark keeps the uranium sands from the Ai Moraes mountains... oh wait, that's a different Alfred Hitchcock movie, and Celia is only the second Mrs. De Winter, not a spy and daughter of a Nazi.

But as you can guess, Celia is exceedingly curious about what's behind that last door. She's also beginning to get the impression that there's something Mark hasn't been telling her about the death of his first wife. All of this gets Celia to start wondering whether he might have killed his first wife -- and whether he might be harboring thoughts of killing her, too!

Secret Beyond the Door is a movie that has some obvious parallels to some Alfred Hitchcock movies, but was directed by Fritz Lang. Unsurprisingly with such a director, the film is technically quite competent, with a lot of interesting visual touches. However, I can't help but think that Lang could have picked a better script to which to apply all those touches. The plot is enough of a mess that I almost found myself wondering whether the film was about to break out into parody. But it never stops taking itself seriously.

Not that Secret Beyond the Door is a bad movie; it's more that if I'd recommend movies from any of the main people involved, this isn't the first one I'd pick. It's still worth one watch, however.

Movie Without End

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last fall, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his films that I hadn't seen before. One of these was Song Without End, which I mentioned briefly a few months back due to the short that preceded it when TCM ran it.

Song Without End is a biopic of Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. As the movie opens up, he's finished his time in Paris, where he set the world on fire with his piano concerts. He left for a village in the Alps due to the insisitence of the Countess D'Agoult (Geneviève Page), the mother of his children, who wanted him to raise his children rather than being a rock-star performer. Since then, another man, Thalberg, has become the pianist toast of Paris, so Liszt's friends Chopin and George Sand come down to the Alps to visit him. Them having visited him, it gives him the idea to go back to Paris and put on another concert to show he's the one who still has the drawing power, not this upstart Thalberg.

Liszt's concert is, a you might guess, the one that's a big hit. Among the few audience members at the concert that Thalberg ultimately cancels is Princess Wittgenstein (Capucine). She decides she should go to the Liszt concert to see what Liszt is all about. This gives the viewer the chance to listen to a lot of piano music, and it's not just Liszt's music, as he was known to promote quite a few composers, from the aforementioned Chopin to the tragic Robert Schumann and, later in the movie, Richard Wagner.

Anyhow, the Princess, having seen Liszt, falls for him just like all the girls in Lisztomania which I blogged about over the summer did. Except that there's a slight problem, which is that she's already quite married to Russian Prince Nikolai. Still, despite having children by one woman, Liszt also falls for the Princess, and follows her to Vienna looking for any excuse to do so. He then follows her to imperial Russia when the Prince asks him for a command performance for the Czar.

A further problem for Franz is that despite not being faithful to one woman, he'd really like to consider himself an observant, even devout Catholic, having thought about joining the clergy. And for Catholics, when it comes to marrige, the marriage is supposed to be eternal, only to be broken by the death of one of the partners. Just watch A Man for All Seasons. Yes, you can get an annulment, but that's only supposed to happen in very limited circumstances. Granted, for the class of people Liszt was pursuing, it was just as much political. But politics might always go wrong.

The story in Song Without End isn't the most exciting one, as Liszt was "just" a celebrity anot not a political leader, when the whole political marriage thing would carry overtones of serious foreign relations. The story is also given somewhat short shrift, which I think is a deliberate choice. Liszt composed a lot, but also performed a lot of other people's music, and there's a ton of music from multiple performers put on the screen here. If you like classical piano, you'll definitely like the music. It would just be nice if it could be in service of a better story.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

Fans of classic movies will know the classic post-war movie The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, and based on the book by James M. Cain. It had already been made into a movie in Italy during World War II, and I think that one, called Ossessione, has turned up on TCM a couple of times. For whatever reason, although one likely being the fact that there were no longer any Production Code restrictions, MGM remade The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1981. TCM ran the 1981 version a few months back, and not having seen the remake before, I decided to record it.

Jack Nicholson plays Frank Chambers, the Depression-era drifter who hitches a ride and gets dropped off at the Twin Oaks, a combination diner/service station back in the days when that sort of multi-purpose rest area was common. (See the Aline MacMahon movie Heat Lightning for something similar.) The Twin Oaks is owned by a Greek immigrant, Nick Papadakis (John Calicos), who is married to a much younger American-born woman, Cora (Jessica Lange). Frank, being a former prisoner, needs a job, and Nick could use the help. so he hires Frank in exchange for room and board.

Cora isn't very happy being stuck in this middle-of-nowhere joint and being married to an older guy who isn't all she thought he was going to be when she married him. So now, with a much younger guy around, her female hormones start kicking in. Frank, needless to say, being a youngish man, also has hormones, and having spent time in prison is in need of a woman, so the two of them are able to get it on in rather greater detail than was possible in 1946.

Cora would like to be rid of Nick, but the laws are such that she can't simply divorce him as she wouldn't get Twin Oaks or even half of it. If he were to die, however.... And, as you might be able to guess, there's a way to speed up that death. The only issue, of course, is that this way is rather illegal as it's generally considered murder. But Frank is thinking with his little head, so Cora has someone whose help she cn enlist to get rid of Nick.

As you can guess, the authorities suspect that Nick's death wasn't quite kosher, so eventually the authorities try to prosecute the case as the murder that we know it really is. But as an attempt to get the two lovers to turn on each other, they only try Cora. The defense attorneys come up with a ruse that involves her revealing the truth, but in a way that the authorities don't find out. This eventually gets Cora off in a highly-publicized trial, but it leaves some evidence with the defense attorney, and his staff isn't entirely ethical. Not that you'd expect ethics from an attorney.

Of course, you probably knew most of the story already, since the 1940s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice is so well-known. So was it worth remaking? I'd say it's a mixed bag. The fact that the 1940s version was made during the Production Code means that there are some issues they couldn't really show on screen and that the 1981 version can be more honest about discusscing. I'd also argue that the Nick character is better cast. In 1946, it was Cecil Kellaway playing the part, and he always came across as so much of a nice guy that it's tough to imagine the young wife wanting to kill him and the viewer having sympathy with her.

The casting of Jessica Lange versus Lana Turner is a double-edged sword. Lana Turner is the sort of actress where it's easy to see any man falling for and doing all sorts of terrible things as she uses her sex appeal to manipulate him. Lange isn't quite so glamorous, but she's also more realistic. I can't imagine someone with the looks of Lana Turner decided to go off to a middle-of-nowhere diner.

In the final analysis, the 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice is also worth a watch if only to compare and contrast it to the Lana Turner version.

As the Earth Turns

1934 was smack dab in the middle of the Depression, and a time when a much larger portion of the population was in rural areas and movies about small farmers were a thing. As such, it was with some interest that I decided to record and watch As the Earth Turns the last time it ran on TCM.

The movie opens up in the winter, with a wagon making it way through the snows of Maine, carrying a family to a dilapidated farm. This family, the Janowskis, are Polish immigrant tailors, except that their son Stan (Donald Woods) has wanted to be a farmer. And with business in the city not being so good, they decided to invest in Stan's future despite them having to spend the winter in a barn instead of a real farmhouse.

Another family is watching the wagon make its way through the snow. This family is headed by Mil Shaw, who is married to George with five kids. I say that she's the head of the family rather than George largely because George seems terminally lazy to the point that you wonder how the family could even survive. The answer to that question is that George gets no little bit of help from his brother Mark (David Landau), whose first wife died some time back but who has remarried to Cora (Clara Blandick), who came from the city together with daughter Doris.

Cora has grown resentul of having to live on a farm and has been raising Doris to have the same attitude. That, and Cora is hoping to send Doris to secretarial shool to get the hell away from the farm. Not resentful is Mark's biological daughter Jen (Jean Muir), who seems on her way to becoming a spinster, but who seems to have no issue with this and actually seems to love farming regardless of how difficult it is. Her biological brother Ollie (William Janney) is the one that the family is really pinning its hopes on; they've scrimped to send him to college and he's got prospects to become a lawyer after graduating some years down the road.

It seems fairly obvious that Stan and Jen are going to become attracted to each other, although Jen isn't so sure of this largely because she understands just how difficult the farming life is and wants Stan to be certain he's ready to live with what is more or less a calling. The other part of the film involves the resentments that the various female characters have: Mil over her shiftless husband -- she even thinks of leaving him at one point -- and Doris over her youth being wasted. She'll pursue any man be it her own stepbrother or even Stan if Jen doesn't jump at the opportunity to have Stan.

As the Earth Turns is an interesting movie. It was released by Warner Bros., who, to be honest, aren't the studio I'd think of as being the best to make a rural movie. But this is more of a social issues movie set against a rural backdrop (really the backlot of course), and Warner Bros. were quite good at making such issues pictures back in the 1930s. Donald Woods isn't convincingly Polish immigrant at all, but this is really Jean Muir's movie, and she does quite a good job. And the movie packs a whole lot of conflict into its brief (73 minute) running time.

As the Earth Turns is definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.